According to the article over at SemiAccurate this benchmark program will be version 2.0 and not 1.1 as originally thought. It will include more scenes, art assets, tessellation. It's unclear what improvements are provided from 1.1 as that was never released to the public. However a tweet from Den Shergin, CEO, Project Manager of Unigine indicates that they've improved performance by 30% by aggressive culling. If interested you can follow his tweets here. What has been said about the newer benchmark is found below:

isn't TPU still hosting the RC2 of the benchmark? It was here earlier today. The problem is they have changed the benchmark by adding an airship, dock and floating fort so the fps can't be compared between the two when benchmarking (i infact see a drop from 61fps to 49fps average at max graphics, 1920x1200, 16AF, 2xAA).

Agreed. Though it'd probably be best to write a complete article covering the entire range of DX11 cards with this new version.

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I second this idea. If the extreme tessellation mode appears to only increase work load without improving image quality, then wouldn't that indicate that extreme tessellation will never end up in games? why do extra work if it gives no benefit.

If we want to test pure number crunching power of these GPUs, maybe a better test would be the GPU accelerated WI-FI password cracker called Elcomsoft Wireless Security Auditor

If you go into the heaven 2.0 directory, you will find heaven.zip (...\Unigine\Heaven\data\demos). If you unpack that, you can see all the mesh files. If you have the free SDK, you will find optimized code that looks for specific hardware before defaulting to a secondary engine.

It doesn't name what it is looking for, but it looks for a specific hardware string, and when it is not found, it just falls back to the old render.

The problem with seaming is still not resolved.

The Tessellation optimization is not truly in place. Instead, we have a series of improved render methods that stack on top of each other. One major flaw with the engine that I already see in version 2.0 is that it is basically version 1.0 with new extensions added that I have not seen before. They are not DX11 library files. They are something else.

I'm not going to say it's nVidia optimized, but it certainly drops a lot of tessellation in, without taking into consideration the fact that a computer will have to run other tasks while rendering it. The CPU usage is maxed out as well.

Running it on our NV simulator, I don't see any advantages, but out simulator is 9 months old, and exists in software to test for final game compatibility, and there are calls that do not exist in that simulator.

I suppose we will soon see. I still say Voxel rendering is more efficient. Seeing as Tessellation on the GTX 480 is handled through CUDA emulation, it can use as many stream processors as it needs to handle the tessellation... but this does not take into account out of order processing, Physx, scenario render, destructible environments, or any other real world scenario.

In short, version 2.0 looks as broken as version 1.0.

We never got to get our hands on 1.1, and Unigine would not send it to me, stating that they did not produce it. I later found out that nVidia bought a license and produced 1.1. As far as I can see, this is not a real world scenario.

The environments are pretty, but they failed to use tessellation gap fill by overlapping or crossing the seams. It looks like it was thrown together to meet a launch date.